Staff Picks: An underrated Western and an international thriller

We’re taking a walk on the wild side this week with new picks from A.V. Club staff writers Matt Schimkowitz and Saloni Gajjar. Matt recommends the new 4K edition of a controversial revisionist Western directed by Sam Peckinpah (probably not the one you’re thinking of), while Saloni has been binging a captivating new drama based on the real-life hijacking of flight IC 814.

Pat Garrett And Billy The Kid Criterion release

Released earlier this summer, Criterion’s 4K remaster of Sam Peckinpah’s misshapen masterpiece Pat Garrett And Billy The Kid aims to give the discarded Western its due—though some dust will never settle on this one. Pat Garrett And Billy The Kid is a rebuke of the types of movies Peckinpah made his bones on. At odds with Ride The High Country and The Wild Bunch, Pat Garrett is about men too old to play cowboy and know only one way to stop. Peckinpah’s contradictory cycle of violence stirs up a New Mexican sunset, capturing the vanishing freedom of the frontier’s final days. Starring Kris Kristofferson as Billy The Kid and James Coburn as Pat Garrett, the film eulogizes the West’s most infamous outlaw and the man who rued the day he killed him. 

Peckinpah begins his cycle of violence that’s in constant conversation with the past, present, and future. Garrett is introduced in flashforward, gunned down by the men he hires to kill Billy The Kid. This prolepsis is intercut with the moment their fortunes changed. Kristofferson, then about 15 years too old to play “The Kid,” takes a seat at the saloon with Garrett. These were once friends and fellow outlaws; now Pat wears a badge. He’s giving Billy five days to leave the territory, or he’ll make him. When Billy asks Pat how it feels Pat responds, “It feels like times have changed.”

“Times, maybe,” Billy says. “But not me.” 

The times were a-changing, and it’s reflected in Peckinpah’s cast. In addition to Kristofferson and Coburn, two Western stars on opposite ends of the generational divide, an ethereal and impish Bob Dylan as “Alias,” stalks the periphery, forcing interpretation. Maybe he embodies folk’s oral tradition, playing a man who quits his newspaper job to follow the legends he would one day commit to song. Or, he’s just there to read bean cans and stab dudes in the jugular. Balancing Dylan’s modernity are the recognizably weathered faces of the Western’s golden age: Slim Pickens, Katy Jurado, Chill Wills, R.G. Armstrong, Luke Askew, and more decorate Peckinpah’s sparsely populated frontier with the glower of lives lived hard.

Criterion’s collection contextualizes the controversies surrounding the film’s release—of which books have been written. Following a production beset by delays, overruns, and illness, MGM took the movie from Peckinpah during editing. Peckinpah responded by attending a screening of the theatrical cut and pissing on the screen. A 122-minute “Preview Cut” emerged about 15 years later, promising the closest possible version to Peckinpah’s original notes. The 115-minute 2005 cut gave the Preview Cut a tightening—to the dismay of some Peckinpah purists—that the new “50th Anniversary” cut attempts to smooth over. 

Wrong Cut Anxiety, the FOMO associated with watching the wrong version of a movie, is real. Luckily, you can’t go wrong with any version of the film. Even the derided theatrical cut is carried along by Dylan’s evocative soundtrack, as the rich visuals and performances imbue each frame with heartache and loss. Subsequent cuts deepen the characters’ connection to each other and the settling West. Different line reads, extended dialogue exchanges, and the use of “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door,” written for the film, provide richer color but don’t dim the ones in the other versions. Pat Garrett And Billy The Kid, in any version, is a unique view of the Western that uses the past to forge the future. [Matt Schimkowitz]

IC 814: The Kandahar Hijack

Skyjacking stories have long made for taut thrillers; just ask any fan of Harrison Ford’s Air Force One or Idris Elba’s Apple TV+ drama Hijack. Enclosed in a claustrophobic, inescapable space with life-or-death stakes? Yeah, it’s perfect fodder to craft a scary, suspenseful story like Netflix’s IC 814: The Kandahar Hijack, which launched on August 29. Reader, I watched all six episodes in one sitting because it’s impossible to press pause on the breakneck pace and jarring cliffhangers. The momentum in the air isn’t just matched, it’s surpassed by the international political discord taking place on land. 

Created by Anubhav Sinha, the limited series is based on a harrowing true story that happened two years before 9/11—the timeline relevance is made clear by the end of the show. In 1999, an Indian Airlines Airbus carrying 190 people was commandeered for seven long days after it took off from Kathmandu, Nepal. Before the plane could reach its destination of New Delhi, India, the hijackers forced the pilot to land in four different countries across the subcontinent and the Middle East. IC 814 essentially retells this saga from different points of view. Sinha excels in this ambitious maneuver because he has his priorities straight: avoiding melodrama to make the script and performances shine. 

Yes, the series begins with a standard shot of people stepping into what will soon become their personal hell, already making us weigh the emotional ramifications. Beyond that, IC 814 takes a startlingly direct approach. Switching from English to Hindi—keep your subtitles on—the action kicks off as Captain Sharan Dev (Vijay Varma) strives to keep everyone on the flight alive. On the ground, political leaders and intelligence officers attempt to fix a mess that grows more complicated with each wasted minute, especially as the flight touches down in Pakistan, Dubai, and, worst of all, a Taliban-run Afghanistan. Various bureaucratic holdups, intense negotiations, and an ultimate moral dilemma make for a solid viewing experience on what could’ve easily been a formulaic thriller. 

IC 814 dwells on the passengers and crew struggling to survive aboard the enclosed space amid dwindling resources (and a disgusting bathroom). Crucially, it briefly quiets the action to focus on the human element of the story and allows Varma to put forth a sublime performance. (Check him out in Netflix’s Darlings and Prime Video’s Dahaad for his impressive range.) But the show’s crux lies in an accurate attempt to dissect the diplomatic reasons people had to wait for a week to be rescued. As the credits roll, I guarantee you’ll be left with a Trolley Problem-esque conundrum, too. 

Does IC 814 pull itself in more directions than it can handle? Yes. A subplot on the media coverage of this hijacking goes nowhere, and Squid Games’ Anupam Tripathi gets a bland Nepal-set arc. Despite the pitfalls, IC 814: The Kandahar Hijack is a commendable effort to revisit a tragedy that far too many have forgotten about (or even know about in the first place). It brings together a group of phenomenal South Asian character actors like Pankaj Kapur, Naseerudin Shah, Manoj Pahwa, and Kumud Mishra. You might not recognize these names yet but give IC 814 a sincere shot for, if nothing else, a nail-biting thriller that you won’t realize has eaten up six hours of your life. [Saloni Gajjar]